Trust : today’s update

Trusting in the goodness of life is really hard for me.  I guess we often only tend to see what we project and what we expect of the world can and does limit us.  It can limit us at times from opening up.  At the same time as a sensitive I see beneath conditions and in my family I witness first hand the different forms of emotional shut down and burying. 

I just had a really lovely conversation with a very old family friend.  Her Dad and my Dad left Holland together just prior to the outbreak of war in 1938, Dad was only 18 and my Godfather (know as ‘Uncle’ Piet) was 20 when they both joined the Dutch East Indies Airforce and made a break for Indonesia.  After my father met my Mum in Australia after being flown here to collect B52 bombers that got delayed my mother and Godmother set sail for the Dutch East Indies in 1946 when my older sister Judith was only 6 months old.  This sea crossing, in and of itself was an ancestral echo as when my Great Great Grandparents left Cornwall in 1874 their first baby Eliza Jane Trudgeon was only 6 months later and she did not survive, dying a few months after the family arrived in New Zealand in March 1875.   The second baby Eliza Jane died at 6 months of age too, before my great grandmother the third Eliza Jane was born.  And guess the name of my sister Judith’s fourth daughter in law  (yes I was shocked to learn Greg’s wife Eliza’s second name was Jane!!  and her family name Caithness, the name of the street my sister and her four boys lived in a few years before Judith’s cerebral haemorraghe.

Anyway I seem to be digressing.  The twenty first of my brother’s eldest son’s eldest daughter is tomorrow and I was discussing with my family friend the fears I have around the reception I will get from his wife.  My friend, called Jo said to me “Deb, can you take something that will remind you of your connection to your inner child?  Its what I did when I had to go to an event held by someone who always invalidated my Inner Child. If Diana is nasty to you, just touch it and remind yourself of that connection and always remember you can leave at any time.” Wow what a great thing.

She said that if my feelings come up I can also retreat, as my sister in law had a habit of using the death stare on my mother (who she never forgave for an intraction back in the 1960s just after she got involved with my brother) and reducing her to tears within about 2 seconds flat.  Mum told a story of how after just such an event at her grandson’s home her granddaughter just handed her a tissue as Mum beat a hasty retreat for the door.  

I think the conflict between then was all about a clash of egos but it may also have been about the fact my Mum and her are both Scorpios and although Mum tried to sincerely apologise in later years, my sister in law refused all such advances. to the point where the only time we used to see my brother was alone on his rare visits to our home town. I am starting to feel sick even writing all of this but for some reason it is pouring out of me this afternoon as the party is only 26 hours away now and I am nervous to be honest.  

Anyway back to the lack of trust issue.  When connections got broken in my family due to these events as well as my older sister’s aneurysm and psychotic break in the years just prior to my father’s death in 1985 my sister in law told Mum.  “I never want my daughter anywhere near Judy” which broke our hearts as my sister was such a kind loving full of zest for life person before her bleed and the subsequent trauma of being abandoned by her husband and committed to an asylum in the early 1980s.  We also lost contact with Judy’s four boys who we reunited with at the time of her death in 2014 and I now have a good relationship with all of them.  But a lot of my addiction grew out of the losses and of traumas that I could not articulate or come to terms with until later years in therapy.

And as some of my readers know I have been asked by someone stationed overseas to help him with financial aid that he promises to return and yet I have no proof of it beyond expressions of undying love and so that is hanging over my head at the moment as well and amping up my anxiety level 200 percent.

To be honest I don’t even know if writing about all of this is of any help… there is a build up going on and I know the astro aspects at the moment are putting pressure on my core wound.. the longing to trust, to love and be accepted, to be myself and surrender but also to self protect and have good boundaries.   My head is all over the place but I just have to get through the next 30 hours.  To be honest I feel like I need to really just detach from thinking about things at the moment.  Thinking about it all and how its going to be tomorrow evening will help nothing.  Tomorrow I just have to front up to this family event and be myself and take my pressie along and give the love I have and see if there is love there.   I really hope so and I am crying over the trust isssues.  Its almost like a lesson from my Higher Power all perfectly timed as I head towards my 25th anniversary of sobriety.  I will probably be the only one not drinking there tomorrow night, and they know how to knock back the grog but in a very civilised way.   I just know I will be carrying lots of feelings so if I sense myself going into a mini melt down I may have to go to the loo or end up spending time there, its always helped at other big family events to have that place to retreat to should I begin to find things too overwhelming as my Mums first anniversary of death is in 11 days time.